The Purple Fig Women's Blogazine Is Now Online!

Nov. 27, 2012 - PRLog -- The idea of The Purple Fig is to create a community for women to share stories and relate without the filters of ego and self-consciousness.

By doing this together we can produce a more authentic portrayal of the journey of a woman.
For me, one of the most poetic expressions of a female experience was by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. In her own life Plath struggled to attain balance between being a mother, a woman, a poet/artist, and in the early sixties it was an even bigger challenge for a woman to do so. Ultimately, she couldn’t cope, so she stuck her head in an oven at the age of thirty while her two small children were in the other room. But within the pages of this fictional account of a young girl’s demise into insanity, we see Plath’s desperation to connect, to relate to something that makes her feel a little less alone in her experience. She, like many of us, wanted to be versatile, possess intricate layers of identities—but instead felt stuffed into one tiny box. The following passage is what inspired the name of this passion-fueled project: The Purple Fig.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

-Sylvia Plath

She then writes on the next page: It occurred to me that my vision of the fig tree and all the fat figs that withered and fell to earth might well have risen from the profound void of an empty stomach. Any woman can agree that being hungry and thinking too much can lead to madness.

But alas, it was exactly what I was looking for and the idea of a fig tree with millions of figs representing the million sides of a woman was perfect! Of course, in her madness, Plath thought if we chose one fig the others would die and obviously it doesn’t have to be this way. What I want to explore with these stories/articles is being as many of these figs as possible at any point in our journey. It is easier said than done, I know this from personal experience, but it’s the journey towards being ‘one thing without the other parts dying’ that excites me. Nobody wants to be stuffed into one label, certainly not this lady.

I wanted to create this particular avenue of connection by publishing stories online from real women, not acclaimed writers with a bunch of fancy metaphors and resumes a mile long. We are looking for well-written, honest pieces that pertain to the journey of a woman. Submit your story/essay pitch, blog idea—anything that you think would fit with The Purple Fig vibe. Please see the submissions page.

The journey of a woman is not a simple one, but there are plenty of uncomplicated pleasures along the way. We not only honor being truthful about the challenges and struggles, we also celebrate a plethora of other simple things, passions and sides to our every day life that are important to us. It’s all here.

Thank you so much for visiting The Purple Fig.